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San Juan police present plan to shift from paper to electronic citations
Summary
The police department heard a vendor demonstration of an electronic citation system that would let officers issue QR-code tickets from phones, streamline court reporting and payments, and reduce data-entry time; the presentation raised questions about costs, privacy, and potential revenue incentives.
The San Juan Police Department presented an electronic citation proposal during the Oct. 8 Commission meeting, describing how officers would issue QR-code citations from cellphones and transmit ticket data directly to the municipal court.
The presentation, given by a representative of Trusted Driver and the police chief, explained the vendor’s web-based system: officers scan a driver license with a mobile device, the software auto-populates driver and vehicle fields and issues a citation number and a QR code the motorist can scan to view or pay the citation online. The vendor said the system integrates with the court management system (CMS), supports analytics (tickets by precinct or officer), and can automate state racial-profiling reporting that currently is entered manually.
City commissioners said the shift could reduce time spent on paper citations and clerical entry. The chief told the commission the current paper process requires a supervisor verification step and then records staff manually type each ticket into the system, consuming roughly 50 staff hours per month; the vendor said writing a ticket would drop from about 10 minutes to 3–3.5 minutes.
Trusted Driver’s representative, Charles Hoskins of Brownsville, described operations details: kiosks will be available at municipal locations for people without smartphones; kiosks and the vendor’s payment option accept card payments only (cash or checks can still be paid directly at court), and online payments use a third-party processor (the vendor cited Stripe). The vendor said costs to the city would include a roughly $2,500-per-year cloud storage fee; device airtime for about 35 city devices was estimated at about $1,500 per month, with T‑Mobile expected to provide some credits to offset airtime costs. The vendor offered a six-month pilot beginning Oct. 2025, and said kiosks would be provided at no charge.
Commissioners asked about incentives to increase ticketing because online convenience and faster ticket-writing could increase the number of citations issued. A commissioner said some jurisdictions saw ticket counts rise after adopting electronic systems; the vendor and the chief framed that rise as efficiency rather than an explicit enforcement revenue goal. The vendor also said the convenience fee for online payments would be paid by violators (the vendor covers the risk if a citation is later voided), so the city would not be charged that convenience fee.
The vendor explained data handling and uptime: records are stored on a shared, federally vetted cloud environment with multiple backup locations; the vendor said it supplies the city with data and then deletes its working copy. The chief said the court department would administer the system (the court would receive uploaded citations and, where applicable, apply administrative fees), and that the solution could also be used by animal control and code-enforcement units.
No formal action or vote was taken at the meeting; the item was presented for consideration and questions. Commissioners requested cost estimates and implementation details be returned to a future meeting for decision.
